Improved Filetype Detection about music21 HOT 4 CLOSED

Sorry, but the external shell program and not working on Windows are show-stoppers to using this approach. If you want to make a separate repo that people can download which adds this functionality to music21 I'd be happy to point to that project.

from music21.

Sure, that makes sense. A half-solution and a new security hole really aren't very good. I'll try again!

from music21.

After some further research, we've decided not to bother with this in music21 itself. The following is an explanation of our decision, for people from The Future who may want to know.

We did find that the python-magic library allows both MIME type and encoding detection without using a shell command. It wraps (and therefore relies on the existence of) a C library for proper operation. We could ship the C library, the python-magic library, and a custom-made "magic file" that would allow fully accurate file-type guessing for all of music21's supported file types, in addition to greatly improved encoding detection. Although this really would solve the two problems, it also introduces significant complexity.

In addition, I believe I'm the only person who's ever desired more reliable file-type and encoding detection in music21, and I only want this because we (at ELVIS/SIMSSA) run music21 on a public Web server. In other words, considering the problems it would cause the music21 developers to maintain a feature that's really only for us, it's more reasonable at this time to improve our software than to push something to music21.

If something changes in the future, and the music21 developers would indeed like to incorporate improved file-type and encoding detection, I would be happy to contribute a patch. Thanks to Myke for allowing my exploration!

from music21.

Thanks for the update and explanation, Chris!

from music21.